POP VIEW

POP VIEW; Why Cole Porter Prevails - Be It Pop, Rock or Even Rap

By Stephen Holden

Published: October 21, 1990

Cole Porter's ''I've Got You Under My Skin'' has been recorded by scores of singers over the years, but the song, which was first heard in the 1936 movie musical ''Born to Dance,'' has never sounded anything like the new hip-hop interpretation by Neneh Cherry.

Against a woozy electronic groove, the singer delivers an anguished rap about a friend named Mary Jane ''who liked to get high with the guys'' and is now dead from AIDS. In adapting the song, Ms. Cherry has jettisoned almost all of Porter's melody, harmony and lyric except for a few phrases, one of which is the title. In this version, the composer's lighthearted assertion of a sensual obsession assumes an ominous double meaning. ''I've got you under my skin'' refers not only to love but to lingering grief and incurable illness. Among other original lyric fragments, the words ''use your mentality, wake up to reality'' have been turned into an AIDS-prevention slogan, augmented by Ms. Cherry's own dictum, ''Share your love, don't share the needle.''

This cautionary 90's interpretation is one of 20 Porter standards that receive often iconoclastic readings by young pop performers on Chrysalis' new anthology, ''Red, Hot and Blue.'' Other contributors and their associated songs include Fine Young Cannibals (''Love for Sale''), K. D. Lang (''So in Love''), Sinead O'Connor (''You Do Something to Me''), U2 (''Night and Day''), Lisa Stansfield (''Down in the Depths''), Tom Waits (''It's All Right With Me''), Aaron Neville (''In the Still of the Night'') and David Byrne (''Don't Fence Me In'').

The release of the album next week is the first phase of a larger project whose proceeds will benefit AIDS charities around the world. Fourteen performers on the record have made music videos that will be shown on an ABC special, ''Red, Hot and Blue,'' on Dec. 1. The program will also be released as a home video next spring. Among the well-known directors involved in the project are Alex Cox, Percy Adlon, Jonathan Demme, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders.

The notion of having contemporary pop singers record Cole Porter is certainly timely, since 1991 marks the centennial of his birth. But the idea also makes conceptual sense - for Porter, in at least one aspect of his writing, was something of a modernist. In a prudish age of spoon-moon-June pop romanticism, the composer, who was married but homosexual, was far more candid in sexual matters than most. His headiest 30's love songs, like Joni Mitchell's confessional ballads, are suffused with the sense of someone simultaneously surrendering to and demolishing his own romantic fantasies. His double vision extended beyond sex to society at large. While his elegant diction suggested a certain snobbery, his lyrics often gently mocked the airs and pretensions of the international set.

Porter's songs, unlike those of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and others, delineated the difference between passion and devotion. Where the romantic finality of Berlin's ''Always'' was a common ideal of 30's pop, in Porter's world it was the moment of passion, not happily-ever-after, that mattered. As in most of today's pop and rock love songs, ecstatic pleasure in Porter's lyrics tended to be as conditional and fleeting as it was devoutly pursued. Rather than fulfillment, passion promised danger and even anarchy. In ''I Get a Kick Out of You,'' erotic excitement is exalted as the ultimate pleasure, beyond sniffing cocaine, drinking ''mere alcohol'' or ''flying too high with some guy in the sky.''

As early as 1930, in the song ''Love for Sale,'' Porter explored the world of prostitution with a surprising accuracy and lack of sentiment. The song proved so explicit that it could not be played on the radio for years. In 1928, Porter's tongue-twisting biology lesson, ''Let's Do It,'' was first heard in the show ''Paris.'' An amusing paean to the mating urge, it portrays the entire universe - from the birds and the bees to ''sentimental centipedes'' to ''the most refined ladybugs'' - as busy coupling.

Even in Porter's more stentorian love songs - ''In the Still of the Night,'' ''Night and Day,'' ''All Through the Night'' and ''So in Love'' - love is portrayed as a tormenting itch. In U2's version of ''Night and Day,'' Bono's strained, intense vocal helps turn the song into a pulsing rock anthem that has the same sense of urgency as the group's No. 1 hit ''Without or Without You.''

Most of the best cuts on ''Red, Hot and Blue'' emphasize Porter's obsessional undercurrents. Erasure's ''Too Darn Hot'' and Jimmy Somerville's ''From This Moment On'' work perfectly as steamy dance-floor numbers. The Fine Young Cannibals' ''Love for Sale'' sounds as if it were set on an urban street corner on which Roland Gift, singing in a weirdly cracked voice, impersonates a pimp offering the services of two giggling female companions. The Jungle Brothers' ''I Get a Kick Out of You,'' like Ms. Cherry's ''I've Got You Under My Skin,'' throws out most of Porter's lyric and substitutes a seductive rap that also endorses safe sex. The spare, chilly arrangements for these cuts strip down elaborate chromatic harmonies of Porter's music to one or two chords.

Even those tracks that remain musically truer to Porter's chord structures offer interesting surprises. In her smart, supper-club version of ''After You, Who?'' the pop-funk singer Jody Watley echoes the young Nancy Wilson. Both K. D. Lang's smoky bossa nova version of ''So in Love'' and Sinead O'Connor's sultry swing version of ''You Do Something to Me'' are technically creditable pop-jazz performances that are also filled with personality. Both singers take the lyrics' heated emotions literally. In her video of ''You Do Something to Me,'' which spoofs the 40's-style night life glamour as portrayed in old movies, Ms. O'Connor, in a wig, appears as a Veronica Lake lookalike.

Porter's elegant, waspish wit also finds several contemporary corollaries on the album. The funniest moment is Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's duet of ''Well, Did You Evah!'' which was introduced in the 1940 show ''DuBarry Was a Lady'' and, with a revised lyric, sung by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby in the 1956 movie ''High Society.'' In ''Red, Hot and Blue,'' the song becomes the disjointed back-and-forth dialogue between a couple of bohemians who put down everything from yuppies to Pia Zadora.

''Red, Hot and Blue'' points up Porter's divided sensibility. With his late-19th-century harmonies and letter-perfect rhymes, which were even more refined than those of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, Porter was a rigid pop traditionalist. But he was also an unblinking realist about life, love, pleasure and the transience of it all. For his time, he was even a touch subversive. The very title, ''I've Got You Under My Skin,'' with its close-up, clinical perception of the relationship between love and skin, almost says it all.